Panel: The State of Nonprofit Investigative Reporting

Watch Full Program

5th Annual Logan Symposium on Investigative Reporting

Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Info
Bio
Chapters
Preview
Download
More

Bio

Raney Aronson-Rath

As senior producer for PBS' flagship public affairs documentary series FRONTLINE, Raney Aronson-Rath guides the editorial development and execution of the series' primetime television broadcasts. With Executive Producer David Fanning, she oversees all phases of film production, from story development and assignment through final edit and post-production. Aronson-Rath is also instrumental in the daily editorial management of the series' nonbroadcast initiatives, including new media projects, audience engagement, educational outreach and promotion.

Since joining FRONTLINE's staff in 2007, Aronson-Rath has supervised a number of FRONTLINE productions, including "Rules of Engagement," which was nominated for an Emmy, and films on domestic health care reform, America's debt crisis and international bribery. Her commitment to exploring how the Web and user-generated content can be used in the creation of public media led to the development of "Digital Nation," a year-long multiplatform initiative set to air in winter 2010.

Prior to joining the series as senior producer, Aronson-Rath produced, directed and wrote six FRONTLINE films -- "News War: Secrets, Sources & Spin"; "The Last Abortion Clinic"; "The Soldier's Heart"; "The Jesus Factor"; and "The Alternative Fix" -- as well as three FRONTLINE/World stories based in India and Hong Kong. Her FRONTLINE/World story on AIDS among India's sex workers won an Overseas Press Club Award.

Before her work with FRONTLINE, Aronson-Rath worked on a number of award-winning series at ABC News, including "Hopkins 24/7", which won the duPont-Columbia Silver Baton. She was coordinating producer on the award-winning ABC primetime series "Boston 24/7" and a field producer on several award-winning specials from the Peter Jennings Reporting unit. Aronson-Rath also lived and worked as a newspaper reporter for The China Post in Taipei, Taiwan, for two years.

Aronson-Rath was the 2005 inaugural recipient of the Peter S. McGhee Fellowship from WGBH. She has also been awarded the Kaiser Family Foundation's Media Fellowship, a Sundance Documentary Fund grant, a New York State Council on the Arts grant and an International Reporting Project Fellowship.

Aronson-Rath has a bachelor's degree in South Asian studies and history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and spent her junior year living in Benaras, India. She received her master's degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Lowell Bergman

Lowell Bergman is the Reva and David Logan Distinguished Professor of Investigative Reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley, and director of the Investigative Reporting Program. He is also a producer/correspondent for the PBS documentary series�Frontline. Bergman�s career spans nearly four decades, most notably as a producer, a reporter and then the director of investigative reporting at�ABC News, and as CBS News as a producer for�60 Minutes. The story of his investigation into the tobacco industry was chronicled in the Academy Award�nominated film�The Insider. From 1999 to 2008, Bergman was an investigative correspondent for�The New York Times. Creating collaborative investigative projects using broadcast, print and the Web became his specialty. Bergman has received honors for both print and broadcasting, including the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, awarded to�The New York Times�in 2004 for �A Dangerous Business� which detailed a record of worker safety violations coupled with the systematic violation of environmental laws in the cast-iron sewer and water pipe industry. That story is the only winner of the Pulitzer Prize to also be acknowledged with every major award in broadcasting. The recipient of numerous Emmys, Bergman has also been honored with five Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver and Golden Baton awards, three Peabodys, a Polk Award, a Sidney Hillman Award for Labor Reporting, a Bart Richards Award for Media Criticism, the National Press Club�s Arthur Rowse Award for Press Criticism, a Mirror Award from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and the James Madison Freedom of Information Award for Career Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Gary Bostwick

Gary L. Bostwick is a trial and appellate lawyer in the fields of complex business litigation and constitutional law, with special expertise in the First Amendment and many other media concerns, especially the defense of libel, slander and invasion of privacy, theft of ideas litigation and copyright, fair use and rights of publicity. He is a Fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers, one of the premier legal associations in America in which membership is by invitation only. Named in "Best Lawyers in America" in the field of the First Amendment. Recognized in Chambers USA, America's Leading Business Lawyers. Certified as an Appellate Specialist by the State Bar of California. Speaks Spanish and German fluently. He has defended libel, privacy, theft of idea and copyright cases on behalf of CBS, HBO, Fox, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Univision, Discovery, NBC, and the New York Times in a wide variety of contexts, including hidden camera matters, reality shows, news, talk shows, entertainment productions, movies and investigative reporting. Represented CNN in the law enforcement ride-along case of Hanlon v. Berger in Montana, and has represented movie director Robert Altman, columnist and author Arianna Huffington, and many other individuals in media matters. Represented Janet Malcolm in her successful defense in Masson v. The New Yorker, a matter in which the Supreme Court established rules governing journalists’ conduct in quoting subjects. Represented a pro bono client in the U.S. Supreme Court in striking down a prior restraint by a trial court in Tory v. Cochran. Represented Jeffrey MacDonald in litigation against the author Joe McGinnis arising out of the book "Fatal Vision". Represented Court TV Pro in successfully arguing for cameras in courtrooms for class action Vioxx trials. Obtained defense verdict for the San Jose Mercury News in a copyright infringement action relating to the use of photos in book reviews.

Margaret Drain

Margaret Drain is WGBH's Vice President for National Programming, with responsibility for overseeing WGBH's many celebrated series seen nationally on PBS, including Frontline, Nova, Masterpiece, American Experience, and PBS's most-watched program, Antiques Roadshow. She also supervises WGBH's national lifestyle, health, and performance programming. Under Drain's leadership, WGBH has won multiple News and Documentary Emmys, duPont-Columbia Awards, and George Foster Peabody Awards for its national programming. Drain began her career at WGBH with American Experience, having served as senior producer from 1987 and as executive producer beginning in 1997. Before moving to Boston, she was a producer at CBS in New York. Drain is a graduate of Columbia University School of Journalism and has a BA from Marquette University.

Charles Lewis

Charles Lewis is a professor of journalism and the founding executive editor of the new Investigative Reporting Workshop at the American University School of Communication, in Washington, D.C.

A national investigative journalist since 1977, Lewis is a bestselling author who has founded or co-founded four nonprofit enterprises in Washington, including the Center for Public Integrity. He left a successful career as an investigative producer for ABC News and the CBS News program "60 Minutes" and began the Center for Public Integrity from his home, growing it to a full-time staff of 40 people. Under his leadership, the Center published roughly 300 investigative reports, including 14 books, from 1989 through 2004, honored more than 30 times by national journalism organizations.

Lewis was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. And in 2004, PEN USA, the respected literary organization, gave its First Amendment award to Lewis, "for expanding the reach of investigative journalism, for his courage in going after a story regardless of whose toes he steps on, and for boldly exercising his freedom of speech and freedom of the press." In 2009, the Encyclopedia of Journalism cited Lewis as "one of the 30 most notable investigative reporters in the U.S. since World War I."

Robert Rosenthal

Robert Rosenthal is the Executive Director of the Center for Investigative Reporting.

An award-winning journalist with nearly 40 years of experience, Rosenthal has worked for some of the most respected newspapers in the country, including the New York Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer and, most recently, the San Francisco Chronicle.

As a reporter, his awards include the Overseas Press Club Award for magazine writing, the Sigma Delta Chi Award for distinguished foreign correspondence, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for Third World Reporting.

Calvin Sims

Calvin Sims focuses on the development of a free and responsible press worldwide as a program officer at the Ford Foundation. His work helps foster new and innovative models of reporting, disseminating and financing quality news, with a concentration on social justice issues, diversity of voices, standards and ethics, and press freedoms. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation in 2007, Calvin spent two decades at The New York Times. He was a director, producer, news anchor, and foreign correspondent and played a central role in the newspaper's expansion into television, documentaries and the Web. He anchored the Times' nightly television news program, hosted a weekly podcast on foreign affairs and produced a critically acclaimed documentary for PBS on the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia. As a foreign correspondent, Calvin was based in Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Seoul and Jakarta. A graduate of Yale University, Calvin has held the Edward R. Murrow Press Fellowship at the Council on Foreign Relations and the Ferris Professorship of Journalism at Princeton University. He also conducted workshops and cultural exchange programs for journalists in Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan as part of an effort by American University and the U.S. State Department to resolve historical conflicts. Sims serves a chair of the Board of Trustees of the Harlem Educational Activities Fund and a trustee of the National Book Foundation, which administers the National Book Awards.

Richard Tofel

Richard Tofel is general manager of ProPublica, with responsibility for all of its non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance, and budgeting, and human resources. He was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper, vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company, and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones. More recently, he served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation, and earlier as president and chief operating officer of the International Freedom Center, a museum and cultural center that was planned for the World Trade Center site. He is the author of "Eight Weeks in Washington, 1861: Abraham Lincoln and the Hazards of Transition" (St. Martin's, 2011), "Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism" (St. Martin's, 2009); "Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy's Inaugural Address" (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), "Vanishing Point: The Disappearance of Judge Crater, and the New York He Left Behind" (Ivan R. Dee, 2004) and "A Legend in the Making: The New York Yankees in 1939" (Ivan R. Dee, 2002).

Mc Nelly Torres

Mc Nelly Torres is an award-winning investigative journalist based in South Florida and Associate Director and Reporter of the Florida Center for Investigative Reporting. Most recently, Torres was the Stimulus Team Leader for EdMoney.org, a project of the Education Writers Association. Torres has worked in five dailies across the nation. She also writes consumer investigations for ConsumerAffairs.com and she recently collaborated with journalists from El Centro de Periodismo Investigativo de Puerto Rico to investigate the corporation behind a deadly refinery explosion in Puerto Rico on Oct. 23, 2009. She covered education at the San Antonio Express-News in Texas where she wrote about four politically contentious school districts including the largest inner city school system. Her work in San Antonio contributed to the conviction of a school building architect. At the Morning News in South Carolina, she garnered local and state awards for her investigative work on the state’s hog farm permit filing process. Her work in South Florida as a consumer writer for the Sun-Sentinel led to the conviction of a businessman with a history of defrauding customers, a state probe of a foreclosure-rescue firm and changes in state laws pertaining to foreclosure-rescue business. In 2008, she became the first Latina elected to the board of Investigative Reporters and Editors, the world’s leading organization of investigative journalists. Torres has trained hundreds of journalists around the country at workshops sponsored by IRE and other organizations. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Colorado State University-Pueblo, formerly known as the University of Southern Colorado. A native of Puerto Rico, Torres has lived around the world while following a military husband who retired in 2005.